Open Access Publishing: Why academia should care about it!

Open Access (OA) publishing means those scholarly publications which are available free of cost online, which can be distributed without restrictions.  According to famous OA advocator Peter Suber “Open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” The conventional process of publications has limitations in terms of Access and uses. Restriction in access means they are not free; & restriction in uses means they are bounded by copyright law.  More about the conventional journal publishing industry can be read here. 

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines it as “Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.”

Open Access movement started in 1991 with the establishment of arxiv.org which is a repository for preserving pre-prints of physics articles. Later it was supported by major public declarations like Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002, Bethesda statement in 2003, Berlin Declaration in 2003. Recently in February 2018, the Delhi Declaration on Open access came up with more than 120 signatories.

Why Open Access:

• The core philosophy of open access is unrestricted flow of information from source to users. For example, if the outcome of an agricultural research activity is thought to be useful for farmers, then that research should reach the farmers without any kind of price and license barrier.

• The commercial publishers hardly make any contribution in R&D activities for generating research related content published in them. It is the govt. and private institutions that make funding towards research. Now if they publish their research outcome in those journals, the institutions need to pay the publishers again for accessing their own content.

• The price of commercial journals has increased tremendously in the last decade, which have made it impossible for libraries to purchase all of them.

Means of Publishing OA contents.

OA contents can be made available via Open access journals and Open access repositories.

• Open access journals publish articles in Open access mode. It is called the “Gold” way of publishing. The contents of OA journal are always free. The contents are always peer reviewed. Sometimes authors need to pay some amount of money as Article Processing Charge(APC) for making the article open access and tis APC charge when needed can be covered under research grant. Funding of many Open access journals are backed by Govt. agencies (like CSIR, DRDO journals in India), Scholarly associations or by corporate funding (Medknow Publications Journals in India), authors need not to pay APC charge for publishing in these kind of Open access journals. Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) is a portal that lists open access journals published all over the world.

• Open access repositories are digital archives that collects and preserves Open access articles. This is called the Green way of publishing OA contents. The OA repositories do not conduct peer review themselves, but archives contents peer reviewed by others i.e. contents are preserved in repositories after publication in any other source. Now most of the commercial journals allow to archive contents published in commercial journal too if the journal permits it. But it is always advisable to read the journals policy of self-archiving. 

  

  SHERPA-RoMEO archiving colour codes

Myths about open access:

• OA contents do not have copyright: Many people think that open access contents do not have any kind of copyright. It is completely wrong. The author right is always protected by copy right in Open Access contents. It is the distribution right for the users which is more flexible for OA contents. The readers are authorized to do unlimited copies of OA contents and distribute it to others until and unless it is not meant for business. OA contents often licensed with creative commons licensing attributes.

• OA articles are not peer reviewed: Many people often mistake and compares genuine open access journals with Predatory journals. Predatory journals are those journals that publishes articles by taking money from authors without any peer review. OA journals are genuine journals that conducts peer review and follow all the ethical steps in publishing. It is for sustaining the monetary burden of publication, for which genuine OA journals not backed by any kind of external funding asks for nominal cost for publication. It is needed to be remembered that OA articles are meant to be free for the readers. PLOS One, PLOS Biology are some of world’s leading OA journals having very high impact factor.